Data For Energy: Beyond The Big Data Hype at Agoria (Brussels)

 

Ferdinand Casier (@FerdiCasier, Agoria) opened the event – organized by Agoria in cooperation withFebeg and Synergrid – focused on Big Data in the energy sector. First, Christophe de Clercq (@ChriDeClercq, Customer Service Manager at Eneco, see picture below) gave a talk titled “Data is the new Oil”. He shared his experience as a manager of the customer contact center. In many industries, the customer contact center is the primary or even only communication channel with customers. Hence, it’s important to leverage the information obtained through this channel.

 

Next, Vincent Keunen (@VincentKeunen, CIO at Lampiris) took the floor. He discussed data collection of smart meter data. This allows for real-time followup of energy consumption. Lampiris uses KairosDB on top of Cassandra to store and visualize time series data in true “big data” fashion.

 

 

 

Next, Tom De Cordier (Councel at Allen & Overy, see picture below) discussed compliance with data protection laws. When listening to lawyers, leveraging big data in Europe will be tough due to new legislation to be passed soon.

 

 

Next, Philippe Mol (Project Engineer at Maintenance Partners, part of Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, see picture below) presented a nice tool (Wintell Health Monitoring). Maintenance Partners uses data mining to monitor wear and tear in wind turbines, and to industrialize predictive/preventive maintenance.

 

 

Next, Bernard Flament (Head of Technical Services at Prayon, see picture below) presented his talk titled “Industrial Big Data: Graveyard or Goldmine?”. Since 2000, engineers at Prayon Engis developed a data architecture to record industrial process data. Last year, they achieved 1 million EUR in recurring energy savings by providing an information feedback loop to operators, and by propagating best practices on how to operate industrial machinery.

Next, Els Descheemaeker (@edescheemaeker, innovation manager at Essent.be @Essent, see picture below) presented a great talk on the opportunities of open data (#opendata). She discussed their appsforenergy event – a co-creation event for developers, students and young professionals. They want to inspire and invite other companies to open up data, so that it can be combined to the benefit of consumers and other organizations.

Finally, Imre Vanhemelryck (Data Scientist at Electrabel – GDF Suez Group, see picture below) presented his talk “From Big Data to Big Opportunities for Utilities”.

 

Below, you find a list of upcoming Agoria (@AgoriaNL, @AgoriaFR) events in the same Big Data series. See you at one of the next events.

 

 

 

Sogeti BI Symposium in Amsterdam

 

900+ attendees came to Bussum near Amsterdam for the Sogeti BI Symposium titled “Data is changing the game” (#bisymp). Michiel Boreel (@MichielBo, CTO of Sogeti Group, see picture above) opened the first day of the largest 2-day Business Intelligence event in The Netherlands. This year’s topic (data as a game changer) definitely must have resonated with the audience because the same event drew 650 attendees last year. First, Tim Jennings (@tjennings, Chief Analyst & Research Fellow at Ovum IT, see picture below) took the stage with his industry transformation talk. He gave many examples of industries where data acts as a game changer ranging from sports, over business to healthcare.

Next, Paul Sonderegger (@PaulSonderegger, Big Data Strategist at Oracle, see picture below). Click here for his slides.

 

After the coffee break, Johan Arts (@ArtsJohan, IBM, see picture below) took the stage. He mentioned a nice slogan: “Data is the new oil”.

Next, René Stolp (RDC, see picture below) gave his talk on how data is changing mobility.

After lunch and a few breakout sessions, Ralph van den Berg (Rabobank, see picture below) showed some nice Tableau visualizations to help management take better decisions.

Karl Raats (@KarlRaats, see picture below) wrapped up the first day.

The second day of the event started with a talk by Erik van Ommeren (@InnovationErik, Sogeti USA @VINTlabs, see picture below). Click here for his slide deck. He also discussed their book: No More Secrets with Big Data Analytics.

 

Next, David M Walker (datamgmt.com, see picture below) delivered his talk “Data-Driven Insurance Underwriting” (slides in Dutch). Sensors in cars might just revolutionize the Insurance business!

 

Next, Rick van der Lans (@rick_vanderlans, see picture below) delivered a humorous speech.

Next up was lunch and breakout sessions. I delivered my speech (@dirkvandenpoel) in one of them together with ir. Paul Poelmans (@Sogeti, @Sogeti_NL). Click here for our slides. Next, I attended Henk Richmond and Wim van Zanten’s talk (see picture below).

Next, Bart Götte delivered a talk (click here for the slides).

In sum, a great free event everyone should attend! See you next year.

SC13 Supercomputing Conference in Denver, CO – Conference Day 3

 

Thursday morning we first had to conquer the elements (cold + snow) to get to the convention center. The keynote session started off with a talk by Prof. Dr. Alok Choudhary (Northwestern University, see picture below) titled “BIG DATA + BIG COMPUTE = An Extreme Scale Marriage for Smarter Science?”.

 

Next, Prof. Dr. Vern Paxson (University of California, Berkeley, see picture below) took the stage with a talk titled “The Interplay Between Internet Security and Scale”.

He did a great job in outlining how the scams work. Then, he discussed how they were able to infiltrate the systems to combat them.

Next, I attended a vendor-sponsored talk at the NVIDIA booth. They presented benchmarks with the new Tesla K40 GPU.

 

 

Throughout the conference, interesting posters – such as the one shown below – were displayed.

 

That afternoon, I also took the Intel Tour on the show floor. It’s an interesting concept: Intel walks a group of attendees to some of its partner companies.

 

 

That evening the SC13 conference dinner took place in the Denver Science Museum.

 

 

SC13 Supercomputing Conference in Denver, CO – Conference Day 2

 

Wednesday, November 20, 2013 I first attended the SGI Innovator Breakfast meeting. After an introduction by both the CEO of SGI (Jorge Titinger, @SGI_Corp) and CMO (Bob Braham) – during which they both emphasized that SGI is winning big contracts again after some “difficult” years – they invited Rajeeb Hazra (Intel VP and GM of Technical Computing Group, @IntelITS). He discussed Intel’s vision on the paradigm shift from supercomputing to Big Data.

 

Next, I rushed to the Colorado Convention Center. Prof. Dr. Saul Perlmutter (Professor at UC Berkeley @BerkeleyLab & astrophysicist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, see picture below) delivered his keynote talk. He basically updated us on what has happened between his talk at SC98 and today.

 

Next, Dr. Warren Washington (National Center for Atmospheric Research) took the stage for his talk titled “Climate Earth System Modeling for the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report (AR6): Higher Resolution and Complexity” showing the evidence for global warming.

 

After lunch, I attended the Exhibitor Forum presentation session. First, Eurotech engineers (including Giovanbattista Mattiussi) took the stage to discuss energy-efficient HPC systems (@EuroTechHPC). 

They argued that obtaining high energy efficiency from standard components is a matter of architectural decisions and design capable of optimizing the contribution of accelerators, liquid cooling and power conversion to maximize efficiency. 

Next, Alexander Moskovsky (RSC Group, see picture below) gave his talk “A Practical Approach to Exascale – a New RSC’s Ultra High Density Solution with Intel® Xeon Phi™”. RSC Group (www.rscgroup.ru/en), a developer of direct liquid cooling technologies for HPC and supercomputing systems, announced a new product at SC13: a new ultra-high density, energy efficient solution with Intel Xeon Phi coprocessors.

 

Finally, William Blake (Cray Inc., @CRAY_Inc) gave his presentation “Map to Discovery: Data-Intensive Course”. 

Next, I attended the keynote talk by Dr. Colin P. Williams (@DWaveSys, D-Wave Systems) on Quantum Computing. This was – in my humble opinion – probably the best talk of the entire SC13 conference.

It is quite remarkable for a 100-employee company to rank 4th in terms of patents among all companies worldwide.

 

Instead of building a “generic” quantum computer they chose to build a machine to tackle specific well-defined tasks. He mentioned that they engineered a system to solve NP-hard optimization problems of size 2^512. This can be used to do discrete combinatorial optimization, which performed 118000x faster than Cplex (in some applications). Google used the system for building better ensemble binary classifiers (a task very near and dear to our heart: see www.datamining.UGent.be).

 

 

 

In late-afternoon, I attended the Super-R (#rstats) BOF (Birds-of-a-feather) session. This is basically a gathering of like-minded computer scientists/engineers. It was a well-attended session. They first started by talking about using R on supercomputers (e.g. @TACC #XSEDE).  Next, they proceeded to discussing use cases of using R for larger datasets. One cool example was: performing a linear regression on 24,000 cores on 1 TB of data with 2000 predictors in 2 minutes (Benchmark on Kraken without GPUs). They also showed how to use Intel Xeon Phi with R to achieve a speedup of up to 60x using Xeon Phi compared to one-threaded (off-loading using MKL).

Wednesday evening, I joined the Mellanox event. Hundreds of attendees joined Eyal Waldman (CEO at @Mellanoxtech, see picture below). He highlighted the recent achievements in the area of Infiniband Interconnects: e.g. their Connect-IB™ FDR 56Gb/s InfiniBand adapter. He also highlighted the (long-distance) RDMA developments, including those with GPUs.

Next, Bob Galush (VP IBM System x high volume servers, @IBMSysXBlade, see picture below) took the stage during the Mellanox event. He discussed how IBM and Mellanox InfiniBand integrate to form powerful supercomputers. 

The final talk of the day was by Bob Ciotti (Chief Architect and System Lead for Supercomputing NASA Advanced Supercomputing Division – NASA Ames Research Center,@NASA_NAS). He discussed the different upgrade cycles NASA went through in their supercomputing center.

 

 

 

SC13 Supercomputing Conference in Denver, CO – Conference Day 1

 

Tuesday, Nov. 19 started off with a keynote presentation titled “The Secret Life of Data” by Dr. Genevieve Bell (@feraldata, Intel Fellow). She gave many examples about the value of data: The first example is the Domesday book. Next, she discussed the value of visualizations.

Next, Prof. Dr. Klaus Schulten (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, see picture below) took the stage for the first invited talk on “The State of Extreme-Scale Molecular Dynamics (in Computational Biology)”. He explained how they use computational models to explain how drugs attack viruses (e.g. interfere in the communication, acting as a con-artist).

 

Next, Prof. Dr. Takashi Furumura (Earthquake Research Institute, University of Tokyo, see picture below) presented a great keynote speech on the topic of “Visualization of Strong Ground Motion and Tsunami for the Great Earthquake of 2011 Off Tohoku, Japan”. 

Several years ago, the Kobe earthquake was analyzed in great detail. This led to the installation of many more sensors across the entire country. The outcome was a prediction of a M7.5 earthquake in the area off Tohoku. It happened, but was much stronger: In 2011 a magnitude 9.0 earthquake off Tohoku took place. Thanks to the many sensors, very detailed measurements were available. As a result of having better data, Japanese researchers were able to create a compound ground motion and tsunami simulation (instead of separate ones)! After building the prediction models, they then applied it to the likely new earthquakes…

 

 

Next, I walked the show floor again. Japanese universities and research institutes had a strong presence in Denver.

The NAIST (Nara Institute of Science and Technology, see picture below) showed a video documenting the interesting concept of placing HPC equipment in containers. They have two such HPC installations in production.

After lunch, I attended the Awards ceremony. Prof. Dr. Jack Dongarra (University of Tennessee) received the Ken Kennedy Award. He gave an acceptance speech sharing many interesting ideas and anecdotes in his career.

 

Next, Prof. Dr. Marc Snir (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign) gave his acceptance speech for the IEEE Computer Society Seymour Cray Computer Engineering Award (@ComputerSociety).

 

 

 

Finally, Prof. Dr. Chris Johnson (University of Utah) accepted the IEEE CS Fernbach Award for his visualization institute. 

Next, I attended the European Cray meeting. Cray CEO (@Cray_Inc), Peter Ungaro (see picture below), discussed the highlights of their strategy: The fusion of Supercomputing and Big Data.

 

 

 

SC13 Supercomputing Conference in Denver, CO – Pre-Conference Day 2

 

The next morning, Monday, Nov. 18, I attended the Python in HPC tutorial. The presentors included Andy Terrel (@aterrel, University of Texas at Austin, see pictures below), Travis Oliphant (@teoliphant, Continuum Analytics), Aron Ahmadia (@ContinuumIO, Continuum Analytics), Kurt Smith (@enthought, Enthought, Inc.). They discussed many interesting projects such as NumPy, SciPy, Matplotlib, SymPy, Pandas, Cython, Mayavi, mpi4py, and IPython.

 

 

Next, also before lunch, they discussed Cython (C-extensions to Python). In general, the organizers provided excellent facilities (sufficient fixed ethernet connectivity as well as great eduroam wireless + power sockets).

 

A lunch was offered to those who registered for the SC13 tutorials (see picture below).

 

In the afternoon, I switched to the “R: From your Laptop to HPC and Big Data” session by Drew Schmidt  (University of Tennessee) and George Ostrouchov. Because yours truly (@dirkvandenpoel) also started using R for teaching my “Predictive and Prescriptive Analytics” course in www.mma.UGent.be andwww.me.UGent.be, this was a highly relevant topic. They gave a superb talk about their pbdR package, which enables distributed computation of matrix operations.

 

 

That evening, the huge exhibit floor opened to the 10,000+ attendees. Lots of well-known universities, companies, and research institutes were present on the show floor including (see pictures below):@PRICE_RI, @FraunhoferITWM (they offered great free coffee), @TACC, @IntelHPC, @IBM,@NVIDIA, @ARM, among many others.

 

 

The NASA booth displayed a quantum processor (@NASA, see picture below).

 

SC13 Supercomputing Conference in Denver, CO – Pre-Conference Day 1

 

10,000+ computer scientists attended the largest supercomputing event in the world at the Colorado Convention Center in Downtown Denver organized by the sighpc of ACM and the IEEE CS.  Even with this record turnout, the organization did a flawless job! Congratulations! The highlights include a great keynote by Dr. Williams (D-Wave), an announcement by Intel to update their Xeon Phi 22 nm co-processor to a new 14 nm (bootable) version called Knights Landing. Moreover, NVIDIA announced the Kepler K40 graphics/co-processor. The many interesting talks about (big) data visualization was another highlight.

 

This edition marked the 25th anniversary of the SC conference. The organizers compiled a fact sheet for every single edition as well as some overviews by specific topics, and posted them at the entrance of the convention center (see picture below).

On Sunday, Nov. 17, the conference started for me by following a tutorial about advanced MPI (Message Passing Interface) programming. Rajeev Thakur (Argonne National Laboratory, see picture below) discussed how to use MPI datatypes (MPI_Type_continguous, MPI_Type_Vector). He gave several specific example programs. Moreover, he discussed good practice to defer synchronisation (MPI_Waitall).

Next, James Dinan (Intel Corp, see picture below) explained one-sided communication (also called MPI RMA: remote memory access). The basic idea is to decouple data movement from process synchronization. The main advantage being that operations are non-blocking (MPI_Put, MPI_Get, MPI_Accumulate).

After lunch, I switched to the 4th SC Workshop on Petascale (Big) Data Analytics: Challenges and Opportunities. The first talk was by Matthieu Lefebvre (Princeton University, see picture below) on large-scale seismic imaging workflows.

 

Subsequently, I returned to the advanced MPI programming tutorial. Torsten Hoefler (ETH Zürich, see picture below) explained MPI topology (among other topics).

 

 

Big Data Class at Ghent University

As part of the “Marketing Information Systems/Database Marketing” course Prof. Dr. Dirk Van den Poel (@dirkvandenpoel, see picture above right) and Michiel Van Herwegen (see picture above left) started teaching true “Big Data” technology to our Master of Science in Business Engineering (@HIR_ME) and Master of Science in Marketing Analysis (@MMA_CRM) students at Ghent University on Nov. 7, 2013. Next year, this course will be renamed “Big Data”. Among the 60+ attendees, we also welcomed a strong delegation from Sogeti, our IT partner. Follow along on our www.bigdata.ugent.be website. Starting next sessions, our students will do hands-on exercises in Hadoop/Hive on our own dedicated hardware. Many thanks to Prof. Emeritus Jean-Jacques De Clercq for installing our Hadoop clusters, and for keeping them “in the air”.

 

 

INMA 2013 Conference in Berlin, Germany – Day 2

 

Day 2 of the conference started with a session called INMA Clinic. The INMA organizers had asked four experts to discuss the specific case study of a European newspaper (that is in bad shape and is presented anonymously to the public). In the picture below, Robert Whitehead is setting the stage for the four experts.

The first expert in the field of strategy is Ricard Robbstål (CEO, Göteborgs-Posten, Göteborg, see picture below). He suggests to focus the attention on the organization, optimizing product, and reducing costs.

Next, Kirk Macdonald (Executive VP, Digital First Media, Denver, see picture below), the expert in advertising, took the stage.

The third is an expert in Big Data – yours truly – Prof. Dr. Dirk Van den Poel (@dirkvandenpoel, Ghent University, Belgium, see picture below). In my talk, I argue that the middleground between journalists and readers does not necessarily need to be a newspaper. In the future, big data/analytics could/will play a major role. Moreover, other organizations now become media companies (e.g. loyalty programs with magazines targeting specific groups): retailers like Tesco or big companies like P&G. More journalists go to work for these organizations than traditional media companies.

 

The last of the four experts was Olivier Bonsart (Dir. Délégue Ouest-France and CEO of 20Minutes, Rennes). He was very much in favor of playing out the local content and knowledge about the local market.

Then, we had a nice panel discussion about our different recommendations with many participants in the audience.

Unfortunately, I had to check out of the hotel after our session, so I missed the INMA Media Research Experts. Next, Brainsnack© Presentations on Attracting the young were held. Hans Nijenhuis (@HansNijenhuis, Deputy Editor-in-Chief, NRC Handelsblad & NRC Next, Amsterdam, see picture below) discussed how to add 75.000 valuable subscribers by adding just 25 young journalists.

 

Next, Matthias Leonhard (@wk_leonhard, Senior Editor, DIE WELT Kompakt, Berlin) discussed how they created “Die Welt·Kompakt” version of “Die Welt”. 

 

After lunch, Ravi Dhariwal (CEO, Times of India, Delhi, India, see picture below) presented an interesting talk.

Sandy MacLeod (VP Consumer Marketing & Strategy, The Toronto Star, Toronto, Canada, see picture below) shared a number of print opportunities that may be applicable to others as well. E.g. generating incremental revenue by producing special event specific newspapers (see picture below), partnerships with companies…

Next, Rudy van Halle (@HalleRudy, bpost, Brussels) presented a nice case study. The Belgian postal services purchased a digital printer together with a publisher (which is facing a decreasing subscription base, but still has to customize 480 different regional versions).

 

Steve Aucklant (CEO, Local World, London, see picture below) presented his talk “The National – grouping all UK regional newspapers together”. 

 

Next, Tobias Trevisan (Geschäftsführer, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Frankfurt, see picture below) discussed “The Quality Alliance”, grouping FAZ, Handelsblatt, Die Zeit and Süddeutsche Zeitung. 

During the last session of this great event Earl Wilkinson (CEO INMA, Dallas, USA, see picture below) took the stage with his “News Media Outlook 2014”. 

 

 

INMA 2013 Conference in Berlin, Germany – Day 1

 

Next morning, it was time for the real start of the European INMA conference in the great venue of the Grand Hyatt in Berlin.

 

 

The event was opened by Carsten Erdmann (@Carsten_erdmann, Chief-Editor, Berliner Morgenpost) and Grzegorz Piechota (INMA European Board President), as well as the conference chair Robert Whitehead (Media Expert Australia, see picture below).

 

The opening theme was “Generating Advertising Revenue”. The first session was by Jochen Volkers (Managing Director, Pilot Agency, Hamburg) titled “Steering brands through the digital shift”.

 

 

Next, Frode Eilertsen (@DigitalFrode, Executive VP for Strategy and Digital Transformation, Schibsted, Oslo, see picture below) took the stage for a talk titled “Digital Transformation: Schibsted’s massive, global investment and rapid build-up of Advanced Data Analytics”. Given my area of interest, this probably the presentation I liked best with lots of big data and analytics content. Another interesting quote of his was: “Not just a segment of one, but of one-tenth (the person in the right context)”.

 

 

Next up was Ebele Wybenga (@ebelewybenga, Journalist, Amsterdam). He offered some nice examples of new creative ways of publishing. 

 

After the coffee break, it was time for another highlight of the day, “Paid-content Strategy of the New York Times” by Yasmin Namini (@NYTimes, Senior Vice President – Chief Consumer Officer, NY Times, New York). Her newspaper now has 700,000+ subscribers, and is a successful example of using a paywall. 2012 marked the first year when revenue from circulation outpaced revenue from advertising (see picture below).

 

She concluded with the NYTimes’ four strategic choices for the future.

Next, Christian Stavik (@FVNChristian, News editor, Fædrelandsvennen, Kristiansand, see picture below) presented his talk “The launch of paywalls at Fædrelandsvennen”.  

Håkon Borud (@dthakon, Editor-in-chief, Drammens Tidende, Drammen, see picture below) was the next speaker in our quest to find successful implementations of paid content strategies. 

 

Next, Isabelle André (CEO Le Monde Interactif, Le Monde, Paris) talked about their paid content strategies.

Finally, it was time for a panel discussion, led by Niklas Jonason (@niklasjonason, managing director at CityGate, Sweden, far left in the picture).

Just before lunch, Astrid Jørgensen (@compaindur, Head of Commercial – Digital Subscriptions, Ekstra Bladet, Copenhagen) took the stage with a short presentation titled “EKSTRA – Denmark’s largest newspaper site ekstrabladet.dk freemium model”.

 

Next, George Nimeh (@iboy, Chief Digital Officer, Kurier, Vienna) took the stage with a very vibrant presentation.

 

Next, Martin Jensen (Head of Danish Publisher Network, Copenhagen) talks real-time bidding (RTB).

 

Finally, Harold Grönke (@HNA_Kassel, Managing Director, Verlag Dierichs, Kassel) shared his experiences with monetizing video content.

 

 

After lunch, Espen Egil Hansen (@eghan, Executive Editor, Verdens Gang (VG), Oslo) gave a talk titled “The road map to video development and monetisation”. 

Next, Henning Feltstykket (@mobilmannen, Productmanager Mobile & Tablet, Dagbladet, Oslo) gave his talk titled “Making money on mobile IS possible – 6 creative examples of mobile ad formats that work”. 

Next, Harry Robinson (@harrynrobinson, Agency Sales Director, IAB Europe, London) presented his talk “Standard mobile ad formats from IAB”. 

 

Then, Graham Hinchly (@grahamhinchly, Engineering Manager, FT Labs, London) gave a talk titled “We’ve Got A Web for That. The case for HTML5 and Responsive Design”. He discussed the important decision for the Financial Times not to be present in the Apple AppStore.

 

Next, Peter Soetens (@soetenp, Manager Digital Development, Corelio, Brussels) took the stage with “Is there a middle ground between native apps and the web?“

Miller Hogg (@archantdigital, Managing Director, Archant Lifestyle, Norwich, see picture below) discussed how Archant is making good money from magazine and brand extension apps.

Jaanus Lillenberg (@taltsutaja, Development and Marketing Director, Postimees, Tallinn) explained the coming of a true new ad medium, i.e., using gaming industry know-how for profitable mobile native advertising.

Fabienne Martens (@FabienneMartens, Sanoma, Brussels) shares with us her experience in lean start-up innovation (from within a larger company). Below, you find some of her tips.

The last talk of the day was by Deutsche Post.

 

That evening, we were invited to the Museum for Communication in Berlin for a very nice conference dinner. Below,  you see Inge Van Gaal in her “newspaper outfit”.